Poetry Archives

Slow figures in some live remorseless frieze,
  The approaching days escapeless and unguessed,
  With mask and shroud impenetrably dressed;
Time, whose inexorable destinies
Bear down upon us like impending seas;
  And the huge presence of the world, at best
  A sightless giant wandering without rest,
Aged and mad with many miseries.

The weight and measure of these things who knows?
  Resting at times beside life’s thought-swept stream,
Sobered and stunned with unexpected blows,
  We scarcely hear the uproar; life doth seem,
Save for the certain nearness of its woes,
  Vain and phantasmal as a sick man’s dream.